Multimedia Projects in 2020: A New Collaborative Environment

In the past few months, a lot of changes have come to the way we live and operate. 2020 has been a disaster on a lot of levels but it has positives too. I think, for me, isolating myself really worked. I was forced to focus on things that truly matter. The life pre isolation was a mindless run from home to university to work. There were a lot of unfinished important tasks that my subconscious brain was aware of but it took some isolation for my conscious brain to take a note of those.

I worked on a multimedia project with a team of three. I introduced my project and my team in my previous blog. As a team we produced music for three advertisements and a film trailer. The tasks divided amongst us were achieved successfully to complete all the projects. In these unusual times of COVID-19, all of us were working remotely from our personal setups and face a common problem of losing focus and direction after a couple of hours of work each day. What kept us on track was criticism and feedback which was often shared amongst us. We made sure that the energy stays constructive and pushes us forward on the path to achieving the target in the given time.

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Process

I worked on the SFX for the film trailer. To begin, I went through the trailer a couple of times to get the gist of the mood and the flow of the clip. Later, I made a spot list of all the time stamps where I felt SFX was required. Along with the time stamps I noted down what audio roughly according to me would go on those timestamps. This approach allowed me to zoom out and take an overall look at what would be required of me to finalise SFX for the trailer. It allowed me to plan for all the SFX well in advance. My spotting list looked something like this:

Since I was working remotely I looked for the SFX online in various libraries like freesound.org and splice.com. I had to go through a large list of sounds, audition an even larger number and finalise the ones that seemed convincing. When finally mixed with the soundtrack that was worked on by Josh and foley done by James, the trailer came out to be pretty impressive. It was a great experience for all of us working in these restrictive environments and still being able to achieve a trailer we all were proud of.

For the tv commercial music, I started with analysing the overall mood of the commercial. It's a 3 minute long commercial with no dialogues at all. So I had a few challenges ahead of me. I had to create 3 minutes long instrumental music making sure that the viewer doesn't get bored. I wanted the music to be moving and have the viewer's attention all throughout. I analysed a couple other videos and how there music were composed and took inspiration from all of these to finally come up with the following music for the commercial:

Again, with with how restrictive a last few months have been, I didn't have access to session musicians. Sound libraries like Freesound.org and splice.com came to my rescue. I think I've started enjoying auditioning various sounds in these libraries. Even though something ain't useful to you at that very moment, but it gives you a hell lot of ideas for your future projects. These two websites have been a lifesaver for me in this period of pandemic. I look forward to being more creative in these times of isolation and wish the same for all of you reading this. I'm sure no walls can stop us from being creative. Stay healthy!

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The copyright to the videos posted in this blog are not owned by me. However, the music in these videos is replaced and produced by me. These projects were done as a part of education and learning at SAE Institute Melbourne.